For many years, Edgar Oliver lived in a house on East Tenth Street in the East Village that was an S.R.O. Eventually, the other tenants moved out, and the now sixty-year-old Oliver, who looks and sounds like no other performer on earth, lived there with his sister, Helen. Somehow, love entered the gothic establishment from time to time, and when Oliver wrote about it in his brilliant 2009 piece, “East 10th Street: Self Portrait with Empty House,” it was with all the ardor and verve of a romantic who knows he’s an outsider by birth and inclination but who still hopes to find—to believe—those persons who won’t hurt his heart because of it. That’s just one of Oliver’s charms. And weirdnesses. Because who likes to admit, let alone makes a performance out of, yearning in general and yearning for a world that ultimately can’t accept you in particular? Oliver is so brave that it cracks your self-protective reserve—and makes you ashamed, too, for all the conventional behavior and thought you hold on to, just because you think it will shield you, mostly from your own fears about your own difference.

Oliver grew up in a gothic atmosphere, ruled, or should one say shaped, by a very strong and possessive mother who could not see her children as being separate from herself. She raised her son and daughter in Georgia, with its history of slavery and strangeness; Helen was an artist as well, and she would go on to paint the sets for his early theatre pieces. Eventually, the siblings fled Georgia for Paris, city of dreams, before taking up occupancy in that building on East Tenth Street, where the travellers had other dreams. (Helen was chased out of Paris by the rats, Oliver said.) In New York, Oliver wrote a number of outstanding works for the stage, including “The Seven Year Vacation” and the gorgeously titled “Mosquito Succulence.” An early home for his work was Ellen Stewart’s La Mama. Of course, the late Stewart, a champion of genius and the dispossessed, took to the artist with the Halloween-goblin voice: Oliver’s a genius, and dispossessed. He’s the James McCourt of the American stage, a gay man not inebriated by but still prone to dreaming about Poe.

The Axis Theatre is presenting his “New York Trilogy” (Oct. 12-Nov. 18), which comprises “East Tenth Street” and two other pieces—“In the Park,” from 2014, and “Attorney Street,” from last year—all directed by Randy Sharp and starring Oliver himself. He’s a frightening performer, so utterly himself that you can’t compare him to anyone out there, nor can you compare his work to the synthetic or stupidly crafty stuff that passes as theatre nowadays. Oliver, by example, reminds you that theatre first began as a way of making poems live, and gives voice to stories that couldn’t be told any other way. ♦